Crime Novels For Critical Thinking

This Course Uses Crime Novels To Teach Critical Thinking
https://theconversation.com/this-course-uses-crime-novels-to-teach-critical-thinking-231582

“Why is this course relevant now?

Not only does the course offer, for many, an unexpected approach to academic reading, but it also offers a way to make sense of some of the craziness of the world. Students have fun searching the text for clues and thinking critically about language and how sociopolitical contexts shape our current thoughts about crime and justice.

Also, at the end of many detective stories, we not only see how the events fit together to solve the crime, we also get to see which events fit and which are red herrings. The detective narrative makes sense of seemingly unrelated events in, perhaps, a more obvious way than other fiction.

What’s a critical lesson from the course?

I think there are two critical lessons from the course: the importance of reading critically and the importance of historical and social context. Most authors we read use fair play, the clues are there for the readers, so reading critically is important for figuring out whodunit on a basic plot level.

This kind of close reading leads to questions about how authors convey ideas and how to read critically to discover them. Part of this critical reading involves understanding the historical and social context in which they are written, such as how an American story written during WWII with Germans as villains can be used as propaganda.”